Kevin Nolting just won his second Annie Award for editing Disney/Pixar’s Oscar winning feature Soul. He is also the director of the brand new prequel short 22 vs. Earth, which stars Tina Fey as the bubbly title character. It premieres this Friday April 30th on Disney+. Nolting discusses what went into making the short and feature – and why editing is key in animation. (This interview is edited for length.)

Jackson Murphy: What was the inspiration for wanting to do a prequel short?

Kevin Nolting: We had this great character, 22, in Soul, and as we’re making the movie we’re constantly talking about what made her this way. We had little glimpses of it with those brief little gags with the mentors, but we were always joking around and talking more seriously about… all these innocent souls are jumping off to Earth. What happened in her experience that brought her to this?

JM: Tina Fey won a Critics Choice Award for her voice performance in the film. What impresses you the most about what she’s able to do with this character?

KN: She’s a perfect choice because she’s so funny but she’s also so smart, which is basically what 22 is. Being a writer… it’s like with Amy Poehler on Inside Out. We sit down with them before recording and go over things and have them write out things. It’s such a bonus to have somebody like that.

JM: So talented. What a pair: Tina & Amy. And in watching the movie and this short, I love all of the “Hello, My Name Is…” cards that appear in the background. How do you animate all those and make sure every single one of them has an individual name?

KN: Yeah. That’s the thing. Sometimes in animation, as you know, the easiest things for us to do in real-life are the hardest things. It turns out that writing a name on a piece of paper and moving it around an animated screen for all the genius at Pixar and all the brilliant things that are done… it’s one of the harder things to get that done. Like the memory book in Up: getting those pages with the writing and the photos on them created more headaches than moving a house full of balloons across the sky.

JM: Wow. And in this short with all the souls and their masks on, I’m thinking these are just like The Incredibles masks! It’s all in the family!

KN: (laughs) Well, that influence was more Hamburglar, I think, than that.

Kevin Nolting (left), Jackson Murphy (right)

JM: True! You got that right! I have to think as an editor of animation, it’s really difficult to make decisions because you’re editing really hard work. People have put long periods of time into these scenes. Is that really true?

KN: Yes. In animation, editing is part of the writing process, essentially. We remake the movie in storyboards over and over, and that’s the rewriting of the movie. The writer is creating the script for the story artists. The story artists send us the boards. And it’s this sort of cycle that happens.

JM: I’m sure a lot of difficult decisions but for the better of the story and the movie and the way it’s going.

KN: That’s why we do it. Nobody writes a perfect story first draft.

JM: And with Soul, the rhythm and the pacing is so interesting. Were there real editing challenges because of the music and the rhythm and the back and forth of where it was going?

KN: Yeah. With every movie, the rhythm is really the biggest challenge. Because we have different worlds, and with Pete [Docter] movies, the added challenge of that is these high-concept… these worlds we don’t know. How do you introduce a world like that, and how do you introduce the rules of that world without giving people a manual and saying, “This is how this happens.” We went through it on Inside Out and we went through it on this movie where you have to get into the story but the… audience has to feel comfortable in that world. They have to know what’s going on. At least they have to know the basic rules. Just sorting out what you need to tell the audience and how much… and how much of that is verbal and visual.

JM: How was your relationship with Pete this time. Different than previous movies?

KN: We’ve worked together for so long that each time, in a sense, it gets easier. I’m getting better and better at reading his mind. Batting closer to .500 than .250. So that always makes it easier. Obviously his responsibilities at Pixar grew during Soul, so he got busier in other worlds and that made life a little more complicated for us. This one was different in the ways that things are always different on every movie, but it had its challenges.

JM: What was the production timeline of this short?

KN: It was February of 2020. We were deep into production on Soul. Probably halfway through animation we started doing this one. So my job overlapped for most of it. We finished mixing in September 2020. Much quicker, obviously, but we had everything in place. We had the sets and characters. We know the limitations of that world.

JM: It must’ve been interesting going back and forth between the feature and the short and having this entire world inside your mind for so long.

KN: It’s good in the sense that I knew the world so well, but yeah it was definitely a busy time.

JM: Do people ask you all the time about the fact that you edited Up and because of the opening 10 minutes?

KN: (laughs) Yeah but working with Ronnie del Carmen and Pete on that… that’s really a Ronnie del Carmen masterpiece… and Pete. It has definitely changed my attitude towards montages because that’s such an effective montage. My standard is now much higher when people mention the word montage. I say, “Well, it better be good.”

JM: I think when a lot of people saw it for the first time, they weren’t going to look at montages the same way ever again, either, especially in animation. Obviously the world of Soul talks about purpose and calling. When did you discover that this was your purpose and your calling?

KN: By movie career standards, it was fairly late. I didn’t become an apprentice film editor down in L.A. until I was 30 years old. I had worked at different things. In my case, it was a much more gradual process. Some people like Pete Docter, at 10 years old, know what they want to do and start moving towards that. I’m more the type that now, later in my career, I can stand and look back and look at what happened and say, “Oh that makes perfect sense that I ended up here.” But when I was back there, I wasn’t looking ahead and saying, “This is what I’m gonna be doing.” For me, it was more of an unfolding than “this is what it is.”

JM: Did making this movie and short make you think back to discovering the calling and figuring out… in that gradual sort of way?

KN: Yeah. It feels like such a perfect step in the evolution of that. It’s in this sort of unplanned thing that’s happened.

JM: 22 vs. Earth is on Disney+ and Soul debuted on Disney+ over the holidays. How were the holidays for you and the reaction from families being able to watch it at home in this way?

KN: Man, it was such a mixed blessing because we were all disappointed. The movie, on a big screen, is just so beautiful. Obviously there was a huge amount of disappointment that people weren’t going to get to see it that way. But the response was so great. So many more people saw it than they probably would have [in theaters] that it more than makes up for the fact that we didn’t get into theaters.

JM: Do you see yourself continuing in this Soul world?

KN: There’s always that possibility. We have a lot going on at Pixar so there’s always all these ideas floating around. But that would be great to explore this world some more.

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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